Computer Coding Basics You Should Know

Knowledge and understanding of computer are crucial today because computers are used in almost all industries and institutions. If you have a genuine interest in computers and can see yourself making a living (or even a career) out of this interest, then taking computer classes make perfect sense to learn the vital computing skills you need out there in the real world. Computer coding is one of those classes that are getting much attention these days. Basically, computer programs run on codes. These codes tell the computer what to do – from simple text documents to more complex computing tasks.

Even though most people are now using computers in their day-to-day, only a few truly understand how computers work. Some justify their ignorance by the fact that they often use smartphones daily instead of actual computers and that you can always call on tech support for help for most of your computing troubles but wouldn’t it be cool to grasp what happens inside that expensive and sleek device most people and businesses can now live without.

College students have flooded into computer science courses across the country, recognizing them as an entree to coveted jobs at companies like Facebook and Google, not to mention the big prize: a start-up worth millions.

The exploding interest in these courses, though, has coincided with an undesirable side effect: a spate of high-tech collegiate plagiarism. Students have been caught borrowing computer code from their friends or cribbing it from the internet.

“There’s a lot of discussion about it, both inside a department as well as across the field,” said Randy H. Katz, a professor in the electrical engineering and computer science department at the University of California, Berkeley, who discovered in one year that about 100 of his roughly 700 students in one class had violated the course policy on collaborating or copying code.

Computer program/ software involve working with algorithms. It may not mean much to you but these computer commands or instructions makes your computer do lots of things for you. Experts in the field no longer consider coding as an engineering feat but more of an art because you basically create lots of unarguably wonderful things with it.

It has become an everyday activity for kids, like going to swimming classes, football practice or ballet lessons. Every week thousands of children go off to computer coding classes.

Their parents may hope that the programming clubs, often facilitated by the voluntary group CoderDojo, will give them a headstart in life, propelling them to a highly-paid job with a dotcom – even if the mothers and fathers are not quite sure themselves what coding actually is.

“Everyone should learn how to programme a computer, because it teaches you how to think,” Apple tycoon Steve Jobs insisted 20 years ago.

And it seems parents have taken the message to heart since CoderDojo was set up as a charity five years ago. The multi-national movement, which was set up in Cork, has provided free classes in coding for more than 70,000 people, both in Ireland and abroad.

It’s not a bad idea to send young kids to coding school if they really want to. Never force them to do something they don’t like because it defeats the purpose of learning. However, if your kid doesn’t really like to dabble with computers just yet, you can ask them nicely to give it a try considering how increasingly important computers have become in our lives. It’s that vital that computer coding is now being considered to be integrated into the school curriculum similar to what Britain did.